


A World of Difference

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Artist!Lalli, M/M, Nightmares, Student!Emil, rather mild shipping in later chapters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-05
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-05 00:09:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5353481
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world that the Rash didn’t end, an unlikely friendship grows in a run-down apartment building in central Stockholm. University student Emil Västerström and struggling artist Lalli Hotakainen grow from neighbours to friends over the course of a year – but Lalli is plagued by terrifying visions of a very different world, and cannot shake the strange feeling that this has all happened before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The Man in the High Castle, The Music of Erich Zann and SSSS had a multiple pile-up in my head and this is the result.

**City of Bergen Declared Safe  
**

Norwegian officials announced yesterday that the city of Bergen, evacuated five years ago in the summer of 2014, has at last been fully cleansed by the personnel of Norway’s armed forces.

The result of a four-month campaign that began with a daring amphibious landing in early June, the Norwegian victory is being hailed across the Nordic Council nations and the wider European Union as a ‘turning point’ in efforts to reclaim land from organisms infected with the Rash.

“Not since the Swedes took back Mora has there been a reclamation operation of this magnitude that has been carried out so smoothly and with so few casualties amongst the advancing troops,” declared Chief of Defence General Trond Andersen in a press conference earlier this morning. Speaking at the Brigade Nord’s field base just two kilometres from the city’s limits, he went on to praise the “outstanding work of the soldiers, sailors and pilots who have made another corner of our nation safe once more.”

General Andersen has been a key figure in Norwegian politics in recent years, and has spearheaded several successful lobbies for increased military funding. Opponents of his have accused him of blackmailing influential politicians, an accusation the general has strenuously denied.

Following the defeat of the last of the infected in Bergen town square, the city will now undergo a five-month decontamination procedure before the first reconstruction crews are allowed to commence work.

_Dagens Nyheter, online article, 27/09/2019_

 

* * *

 

It was late one blustery day in September and Stockholm was blanketed with dull clouds. On a small street somewhere in the old guts of the city, Emil Västerström pushed open the front door to the apartment building he lived in and hurried inside. A gust of wind slipped inside before he could close it again, tumbling a few dead leaves into the lobby.

He crossed the lobby, the old wood creaking under his boots, and tramped up the rickety wooden stairs to the fifth floor. When he had first arrived at this place, with nothing more than an empty rucksack and a suitcase full of clothes, he’d been worried that the stairs were on the verge of collapse. A month or two later and he was used to the groans and protests they made whenever you went up or down them. The apartment building had been built sometime early last century and Emil guessed that if it was going to collapse it would have done so by now.

The bulb on the fifth floor landing was burnt out again, he noticed with little surprise as he came up the stairs and stopped outside his door. He’d complain to the landlord if he thought that would change anything. Instead he fished out his keys, unlocked the door to his one-room apartment and let it swing shut behind him.

He tossed his backpack, bulging with textbooks and notepads, into a corner with a sigh and made some room on the bed so he could sit down. The bits of paper he tossed aside had headings like “Quantum Chemistry and Spectroscopy” and “Contemporary Organic Synthesis” and “why God why did I sign up for this??”

Emil looked at that last one and smiled wanly. A degree in chemistry had seemed like such a good idea when his careers advisors back in high school had asked him what he wanted to do when he left. After all, what else should a want-to-be pyromaniac study at university? Art? But now, as his second year got underway, he was rapidly becoming disillusioned with it all. The work was tough, the subjects were boring and worst of all there wasn’t an explosion in sight.

“Maybe you should have joined the Cleansers after all,” he grumbled to himself as he got back to his feet and slouched over to his fridge. It was a silly idea and he knew it – he was hardly army material, he’d never done a day’s manual labour in his life – but he couldn’t deny the appeal. You saw the adverts all the time on TV these days, of the soldiers in their full-body Kevlar suits piling into the back of armoured trucks and racing off to save the day from some glossed-over threat. It all looked very cool, until you looked up the casualty figures the Ministry of Defence had recently and reluctantly been forced to publish.

His fridge was empty apart from a few bottles of beer, an odd smell and a plastic tub half-full of Chinese food he didn’t remember ordering. _That’s probably not a good sign_ , he thought. He closed the fridge and leaned against it, wondering what to do. He _could_ go down to the local supermarket and get some ingredients and actually do some cooking for once. Or, he could go down to the same supermarket and buy a frozen pizza. Like he’d been doing for the past few days.

“The hell with it,” he muttered to himself and went out to get pizza, reflecting dimly that no good decision was ever prefixed with those words. He grabbed his scarf from a hook on the door as he went out. The autumn’s chill was coming early this year.

He locked the door to his studio apartment behind him and was just wrapping the scarf around his neck when he felt that itch on the back of your neck that tells you you’re being watched.

Emil turned around, peering into the dingy gloom of the fifth-floor landing. Opposite him was the door the other fifth-floor apartment, which was occupied by a kindly old lady who seemed to think it was still the 1980s and whose name Emil still couldn’t remember. To his left the stairs to the top floor stretched up and further along were the doors of the asthmatic old elevator that no-one who lived there used if they could avoid it.

He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary and was about to head off when he saw something out of the corner of his eye and he turned to look back up the stairs.

Someone _was_ watching him, he noticed with a mix of confusion and annoyance. The door of the room directly above his was half-open and a young man was stood half-in and half-out of the apartment, like he too had been about to leave but had stopped short at the sight of Emil on the floor below.

“Ah… hello?” Emil said, wondering idly if the guy’s hair was naturally that colour of grey or if he dyed it.

The young man said nothing, just looked down at Emil with wide eyes.

“I live here,” Emil tried, pointing at his apartment door. “Have we met before?” Still nothing. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but Emil thought there was a look of almost horror on the young man’s face. “I’m Emil. What’s your name?” he tried.

Slowly, wordlessly, the guy backed into his apartment and closed the door. Emil heard the _click_ of the lock being turned and a _thud_ of someone sitting down heavily on the floor.

“Trust me to end up living with all the freakin’ weirdoes,” he muttered to himself, and set off down the stairs.

 

* * *

 

Half an hour later Emil returned with a pizza and two large packets of sweets he hadn’t meant to buy. He pushed the front door to the building open and nearly walked smack into his landlord, a wizened old man who had probably been born foul-tempered, coming the other way.

They exchanged meaningless pleasantries and Emil mentioned the broken bulb on the fifth floor, which his landlord all but promised not to fix. The man was just heading out into the light drizzle that had suddenly appeared over the city when Emil stopped him with a question that surprised them both.

“Hey, the guy who has the apartment above mine – who is he?”

His landlord scowled at him. With a face as craggy as the old guy’s, it wasn’t hard. “Huh? Why?” he demanded.

Emil shrugged. “I just met him and couldn’t get a word out of him,” he said.

“Ha! No wonder. You spoke Swedish to him, I bet?”

“Well, yeah,” Emil frowned.

“Daft bastard can’t speak a word of it. He’s Finnish or something. What he’s doing over here I haven’t the foggiest. Don’t really care either, as long as he keeps paying the rent.”

“How does he manage that if he can’t speak Swedish?”

“He’s got decent enough English. And besides, he’s got someone who does the rent for him. His sister or cousin or something like that. She reads the contracts, gives him the bank details and he wires me the money.”

“Huh. So – what’s his name? What’s he do?”

“Who am I, his bloody secretary? His name’s Lolly or Lalli or some stupid Finnish name, I don’t know. His sister or whoever says he’s an artist. I don’t care what he is as long as he pays the rent.”

And with that the landlord turned on his heel and marched off, slamming the door behind him.

Up in his apartment, Emil listened to the sound of light footsteps on the floorboards above him. He’d never really been interested in getting to know any of his fellow tenants. He had a few friends from university, and that was enough for him. But there had been something about the way the guy from the apartment above had looked at him, something in those eyes that seemed to shine blue despite the darkness of the corridor. Something Emil couldn’t quite place. Something that said the guy might at least be worth trying to talk to.

He browsed the internet for a while on his phone, hurrying to cache as many pages as he could before the connection died. The apartments used the cheapest service provider around and as a result the connection usually didn’t last much longer than a few hours a day. If you wanted a good connection in the post-Rash world, where every byte was precious, you had to pay.

The news sites were the same old same old: humanity still trying to push the tide of infection back, thanking its lucky stars that the quarantines and lockdowns of the first months had miraculously worked. The Norwegians had retaken Bergen, he noted with passing interest. The article on it was topped by a picture of a commando in sleek grey armour planting the Norwegian flag in the pixelated-out corpse of a giant, one Kevlar-clad fist wrapped around the flagpole and the other clutching a nasty-looking combat knife that she was raising above her head. Flame-red hair framed a face that was grinning a frighteningly enthusiastic grin.

Emil looked at the commando beaming up at him from his phone screen for a second, fighting off a weird sense of déjà vu.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And for anyone wondering where the heck the prologue characters are if the Rash didn’t end the world, don’t worry, that will be addressed!


	2. Chapter 2

**Inaugural Journey of Dalahästen-II Completed  
**

At 6am this morning the first Dalahästen-II train arrived in Malmö Central Station after an overnight non-stop journey from Stockholm.

The journey, which took just over four hours and resulted in only minor damage to the train, is being hailed as a record time for the Stockholm-Malmö line. There to greet the Dalahästen-II on the platform were local dignitaries including the Mayor of Malmö and Torbjörn Västerström, CEO of Västerström Industries, the industrial conglomerate responsible for the design and construction of the Dalahästen armoured trains.

“The launch of Dalahästen-II represents a major leap forward for Sweden,” a spokesperson for Västerström Industries told reporters at a press conference after the passengers had disembarked. “We have now started to achieve pre-Rash levels of efficiency in our infrastructure and transportation links, and today’s successful voyage proves that beyond a doubt.”

The spokesperson went on to detail how there are now plans to extend the Dalahästen service as far north as Sundsvall and as far west as the town of Mora, which was declared cleansed last spring. They also claimed that plans were in motion to phase out the Dalahästen-I engines in favour of a more modern fleet of Dalahästen-II models over the next ten years.

When asked about persistent rumours that the Dalahästen-II project had nearly bankrupted Västerström Industries and that numerous safety concerns have been raised concerning the newer trains, the spokesperson declined to comment.

_Dagens Nyheter, online article, 19/10/2019_

 

* * *

 

Over the next few weeks, Emil saw more and more of the strange Finn who lived above him.

They never spoke, but all of a sudden they were bumping into each other in the corridor or leaving the apartment building at the same time or other little things like that. It could have been accidental, Emil supposed, but they sure didn’t feel that way. But each time Emil would try to strike up a conversation, in Swedish and in English, he never got anywhere. Each time all he got in reply was either an unintelligible mumble or nothing at all.

And then, one afternoon in late October after he had bunked off a lecture and decided to come home early, he walked into the lobby to see Lalli at the doors to the apartment building’s clapped-out old elevator. He was huddled deep inside a coat that was a size or two too big for him and was struggling with several overflowing shopping bags and a large set of blank canvases, trying in vain to manhandle them all into the cramped elevator.

“Need a hand?” Emil asked, skipping Swedish and going straight to English as he hurried over.

“No, I am fine-” Lalli started to mumble, and then one of the shopping bags slipped from his hands and spilled its contents across the floor. Paintbrushes and tubes of paint skittered and rolled away. Lalli barked something in Finnish that Emil guessed was a curse and tried to bend down to pick them up, but the sheer amount of stuff he was carrying made that difficult.

“It’s fine, I’ve got them,” Emil said, leaning over and scooping up the runaway art supplies. He grinned slightly. “Maybe I should hold onto these until you’ve got the rest safely upstairs, yeah?”

Lalli gave a wordless nod of thanks as Emil ducked into the elevator next to him and hit the button for the sixth floor.

“I’m Emil, by the way,” Emil said after a moment’s awkward silence as the elevator began its glacial crawl. “You’re Lalli, right?”

Lalli gave a little gasp and looked over at him in surprise.

“Don’t look so shocked. I saw your name on your mailbox down in the foyer,” Emil said.

Lalli looked away from Emil, down at the floor, and for a second Emil thought the guy looked oddly disappointed.

“So… you’re an artist, then?” Emil asked, holding up the paintbrushes and paints in his hands. “You professional or is it just a hobby?”

“Professional. I guess,” Lalli said after a moment.

“Cool! What do you paint?”

“Trolls.”

Lalli answered so matter-of-factly that Emil was convinced for a moment he must have misheard. He fought to stop his mouth falling open in surprise. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Trolls,” Lalli said again, a little louder.

“Wow… ummm… okay…” Emil floundered, a little lost for words. “You know,” he said after a moment, “I’m not sure you’re supposed to call them that these days.”

Lalli just shrugged. 

Six years since the Rash and humanity was still struggling to come to terms with the grotesque things the disease did to the people it wasn’t merciful enough to kill. Every culture called them something different – here in Scandinavia, they were called trolls. Or giants, when they grew too big. Most people these days liked to pretend they didn’t exist. That way they didn’t have to think about the fact, proven beyond all desperate doubt, that the people they had once been were still in there somewhere.

Some argued they should be put out of their misery. Others said they should be treated with compassion, like any other medical patient. The fact that trolls were almost always blindly hostile made the issue slightly easier to fudge but it was still a divisive one, and not one to be brought up lightly. Trolls were something of a taboo.

And here was Lalli admitting he _painted_ the damn things. Emil was impressed by his boldness, if nothing else.

After a moment’s consideration he decided he might as well ask. “Can I see?”

Lalli squinted at him. “Huh?”

“Your paintings. Can I have a look at them? They sound kind of interest-”

“No.”

Emil slumped a bit. “Ah, okay,” he said, trying not to sound too crestfallen. “Sorry. I guess that was a bit forward of me?”

Now it was Lalli’s turn to look like he may as well do something he otherwise might not. “Not yet,” he said.

“What?”

“I said, not yet,” Lalli said as the elevator ground to halt on the sixth floor and the doors rattled open. “I need to…” he struggled to find the right words in English and quickly gave up. “Half past seven?” he asked, stepping out of the elevator and hovering awkwardly next to his door.

“Umm… sure!” Emil blurted, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically.

“Okay,” Lalli nodded, and darted into his room as quickly as he could with his arms full of art supplies. Emil was left stood in the elevator, still holding the paints and paintbrushes Lalli had dropped in the lobby.

“Okay,” he said again, to himself this time, trying to quell the feeling that he had somehow just made an enormous fool of himself.

 

* * *

 

By quarter past seven that evening, both Emil and Lalli were beginning to regret their decisions.

On the fifth floor, Emil paced up and down his room and muttered to himself. “Stupid idiot! You barely know the guy and you invite yourself to his room the first time you talk to him? To look at his paintings of _trolls_? The guy’s probably a weirdo. _You’re_ probably a weirdo for asking! Yet another brilliant first impression. Stupid idiot…”

One floor above, Lalli sat cross-legged on the bare wood floor of his apartment and buried his head in his hands. Why oh why had he even agreed to this? Normally he _hated_ it when people came up to his room. His apartment was his space, the one place where he could be alone, and now it was going to get invaded by a noisy Swede. What was he _thinking_?

Well, he knew what he’d been thinking.

He’d been thinking, _dear gods it really is him. It’s him.  
_

_It’s Emil.  
_

But what if it wasn’t? Lalli didn’t want to think about that. Didn’t want to think about any of it. He hugged his knees up to his chest for a moment and wished with all his heart that this confusing nightmare would just end.

It didn’t. There was a knock on his door.

 

* * *

 

“Hi, Lalli, you left these behind in the elevator earlier and _aargh!_ ”

Whatever else Emil had been planning to say went forever unsaid as he screamed in terror. He dived back from Lalli’s door, landing hard on his backside and knocking the wind out of himself. The plastic shopping bag full of the paints Lalli had left behind dropped from his hands and spilled across the floor once more. Eyes wide, he scrabbled backwards on all fours until his back hit the wall opposite Lalli’s door and he pressed himself up against it as if trying to push his way through the cheap plaster.

_“What the hell is that!?”_ he screeched, pointing a trembling finger over Lalli’s shoulder.

Lalli, who was watching him in utter confusion, looked over his shoulder at where Emil was pointing and chuckled softly.

“It is a painting. Of a troll.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“Oh,” Emil said meekly, clambering to his feet and clearing his throat awkwardly. “I see.”

In his defence it was astoundingly lifelike, Emil thought as Lalli moved back from the door to let him in. It had been drawn across a canvas so big Emil was surprised Lalli had managed to fit it through the door of his apartment, painted out in regal purples and cold blues and dingy off-whites. Emil walked over to it and stared in amazement at the attention to detail. The strange coils that it grew from in the top-left, like cigarette smoke. The broken and fused bones. The ragged claws reaching out, the gaping mouth full of vicious fangs.

It took him a moment to see the face on the back of the troll’s head, locked in an endless scream of agony.

Emil shuddered and turned away from it, to meet Lalli’s eyes boring into him.

“I guess I walked right into that one, didn’t I?” Emil asked with a lopsided grin. “I ask to see your paintings, so you show me _that_! It scared the heck out of me!”

Lalli smiled a smile so small it was almost impossible to see. He reached down, picked up a portfolio lying on his sofa bed, and handed it to Emil. Emil opened it and picked out the first one he came across.

Rolls of fat, a drooling mouth wider than any human one, rows of teeth and dripping slime, clinging to a ceiling above an incomplete, sketched-out figure that was looking up in terror.

Emil stopped grinning.


	3. Chapter 3

**Infection Scare in Jamaica  
**

Jamaican authorities were put on high alert last night after an infected whale beached itself less than two hundred metres from the Kingston city limits.

Jamaica was hit hard during the initial outbreak of the Rash but was declared fully cleansed a mere three years later. As a result it has one of the highest immunity rates in the world, currently at 41%.

The only person believed to be at risk is an Icelandic citizen who was holidaying with his family in the newly constructed Golden Palms resort, and who was on the beach at the time the leviathan ran aground. This individual, named as one R. Árnason by Jamaican authorities, is currently in quarantine but doctors have stated that they consider the chances of him catching the Rash are “extremely slim”.

Iceland has an immunity rate of only 4% due to a rigorously-enforced quarantine of the island nation during the first months of the Rash outbreak. There has never been a confirmed case of the Rash on Icelandic soil, making it alongside Madagascar one of only two nations where this is the case.

“This is a clear reminder that Icelandic citizens must take precautions when visiting other parts of the world,” Dr Anna Einarsdóttir, Director of the Dagrenning Immunity Project, said upon being asked for comment. “Carry a haz-mask with you at all times and familiarise yourself with its use. Be aware of any warnings local authorities issue and you should be fine.”

Mr Árnason’s father spoke to the media this morning about his son’s predicament. “This is typical,” he said to reporters outside the Golden Palms resort. “The lad only wanted to see a palm tree and now look what’s happened.”

Mr Árnason himself could not be reached for comment.

_Dagens Nyheter, online article, 6/1/2020_

 

* * *

 

Although their first meeting had not gone as well as either of them had hoped – although a lot better than both of them had dreaded – Emil and Lalli found themselves falling into a comfortable routine as wet autumn gave way to freezing winter.

Sometimes, Lalli would come down to Emil’s apartment. Emil would cook for the both of them, and then once they’d scraped the charred remains of whatever traditional Swedish dish he’d planned out of the oven they’d go to the supermarket and buy something you could put in a microwave. They’d sit on his sofa bed and watch TV on Emil’s ancient television set that he had had salvaged from a bin behind a second-hand electronics shop. Sometimes they’d share a beer or two and Emil would talk about his life at university and his life before he came to Stockholm. Lalli rarely chipped in with stories of his own. He wasn’t one for talking and to his deep relief Emil quickly learned that – and learned to respect that.

And sometimes, Emil would go up to Lalli’s apartment. Just months ago, Lalli would have said that if anyone was in his room with him when he painted, he’d never be able to concentrate. But then, Emil wasn’t quite _anyone_ , was he? So he let Emil stay, provided he sat in the corner and was quiet, and Emil watched with a mixture of fascination and slight horror as Lalli picked up his paintbrushes and pencils and inks and paints and poured unimaginable monsters onto paper and canvas.

There was something almost hypnotising about watching him work, Emil thought. He’d always thought that artists sat demurely on a stool when they painted their works, straight-backed, prim and proper, like Victorian gentlemen. But Lalli was nothing like that. When he painted, there was an energy and violence to it that was like nothing Emil had ever seen. He would make gestures in the air, mutter to himself under his breath, stalk back and forth seemingly lost in his own world. Sometimes he was only at the canvas for a few seconds while he made a series of short, brutal strokes with the brush as if he were trying to attack it. Other times he painted and sketched for hours without ever pausing for a break, a nonstop blur of fluid movement that Emil couldn’t help but quietly admire. And bit by bit the subjects would grow out from this, trolls and beasts and giants but also things that had nothing to do with the infected at all, things that surprised Emil when he first saw them. A paddle steamer on a crystal-clear river. A small settlement in the woods that looked like a fort with its palisades and watchtowers. A village by a lake, prosperous under summer sunshine in one painting and burning under a cold winter’s moon in another, strange shapes and fleeing figures just visible through the licking orange flames.

And when he was done Lalli would collapse exhausted in his flimsy plastic chair, sweat running down his brow and neck and soaking through his cheap t-shirt, and Emil would fetch him a glass of water that Lalli accepted with wordless thanks. Afterwards Emil would coo over the new work, point out the bits he liked and ask about why he had painted things one way and not another, and Lalli would try and reply as much as his fatigue and limited English would allow. Over the months Emil began to suspect there was an overarching story behind the disparate scenes Lalli painted, a connecting thread he couldn’t _quite_ grasp, but Lalli never seemed to want to elaborate when he asked.

Occasionally, however, they went for up to a week without seeing each other. Sometimes Emil would hear Lalli’s footsteps on the ceiling above and go and knock on his door, but there would be no answer. Or there would be shouts and cries, as if Lalli was arguing or fighting with someone. Lalli’s door was always locked on these occasions, Emil noticed, and he would refuse to talk about them afterwards.

 

* * *

 

In the New Year, in early February, Emil had an unexpected visitor one afternoon.

A knock at the door dragged him away from a tedious piece of coursework on inorganic metal clusters and he opened the door expecting to see either Lalli or the landlord demanding to know why the rent was late again. Instead, to his surprise, a woman was stood on his doorstep who had the same ashen-grey hair as Lalli, although she was a good few inches shorter and wider than her relative.

“Hi there,” she said cheerfully. “Are you Emil Västerström?”

“Yeah. And you…?”

“Tuuri Hotakainen. I’m Lalli’s cousin.”

Emil invited her in and brewed two cups of coffee. Tuuri cast a disapproving glance around at the mess Emil had made of his apartment and sat down awkwardly on the edge of the sofa bed, trying to find a clean patch between the dirty underwear and the scrawled notes on synthetic chemistry.

She spied something that looked vaguely familiar in amongst the mess and dug it out as Emil brought the coffee over. A painting, about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, showing some ghastly infected creature that was all flab folds and an awful, gaping mouth. Below it, dressed in an odd white uniform and looking up in horror, was the man stood in front of her, a knife in one hand and a flashlight in the other.

In the corner was scrawled: “Merry Christmas Emil, from Lalli”.

Emil grinned and set Tuuri’s coffee down next to her. “I bought him the most hideous sweater I could find for Christmas. I guess that’s his way of repaying me,” he chuckled.

Tuuri smiled and sipped her coffee.

“So, what are you here for?” Emil asked. “Just popped in to say hello?”

“Not quite.” Tuuri reached into a pocket of her anorak and pulled out a thick brown envelope. “He’s not in at the moment, and I’ve got a flight back to Finland to catch soon. Could you make sure he gets this?”

Emil took the envelope, weighing it in his hand. “Is this money? He said he sells his paintings sometimes.”

Tuuri nodded. “To nouveau-riche types looking for a cheap thrill, mostly,” she grumbled. “I keep telling his his work’s good enough to display, but does he ever listen to me?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want the publicity,” Emil suggested.

“Maybe,” Tuuri shrugged. “In the meantime I have to act as his agent.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, come on,” Tuuri said. “Can you really see Lalli selling his own work? He’s many things, Emil, but he’s no salesman. I usually end up having to show buyers round his apartment, about once a month when I come over from Helsinki.”

Emil nodded. He supposed it made sense. “What do you do over there?” he asked.

“In Helsinki? I’m army, same as my brother Onni.” She paused. “I’m guessing Lalli’s never mentioned either of us, huh?” Emil shook his head. “Yeah, figures. I work in the logistics division. Onni’s in the Signal Corps.

“Speaking of Onni, I nearly forgot,” Tuuri continued, pulling something else out of her anorak. A small plastic bottle that rattled when she tilted it. “Could you give him these when you next see him?”

Emil took the bottle and inspected the preposterously long name on the side of it. “What on earth are these?”

“They’re his medication.”

Emil paused. “Medication?”

“Yeah. You know, for his condition.”

“Condition?”

Tuuri squinted at him. “Has he told you _anything_ about himself, Emil?”

“Not really,” Emil admitted.

Tuuri gave him a look that said that she wouldn’t have been as okay with that as he was. “I’m not sure I should be the one telling you this,” she sighed, “but yes, Lalli has a condition. Onni has it too. They have…” she trailed off, searching for the right word. “Episodes, I guess. Where they can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t. The military has drugs that help, but they’re not for civilians, not yet. But Onni’s friends with a guy in the dispensary so we can get some for Lalli as well, under the table.”

Emil said nothing, unsure how to react to this revelation. _All this time and I never knew! The poor guy…_

Tuuri finished her coffee and rose to leave. “Oh, and one more thing,” she said.

“Go on.”

“Can I leave my phone number with you? In case something happens with him, you see. Just give me a ring if he’s worse than usual.”

“Sure,” Emil said, as she jotted her number down on the back of his revision notes.

_But_ w _hat counts as usual?_ he wondered as he waved her goodbye and closed his door behind her. _And what could you do from the end of a phone line anyway?_


	4. Chapter 4

**An Introduction to Madsen’s Syndrome  
**

Of all the psychological disorders recognised by the World Health Organisation, one of the rarest and most unusual is without a doubt Madsen’s Syndrome.

The condition is named after Dr Mikkel Madsen of the University of Copenhagen, who was the first to describe the symptoms. Sufferers of Madsen’s Syndrome at first glance appear to be afflicted with a more ordinary form of psychosis, which is a well-documented and treatable mental illness that results in hallucinations and delusions.

Scratch the surface, however, and Madsen’s Syndrome is much stranger. It is characterised by dissociative episodes where the patient believes themselves to be in a world where a much more virulent strain of the Rash virus arose in late 2013, leading to a worldwide apocalypse and the collapse of human civilisation.

What is highly unusual about the syndrome is that all sufferers, even those who have had no contact with each other, give reports of this imagined world that have an astounding level of agreement with one another. In all cases, when asked to describe their hallucinations, the salient points are the same: the Nordic Council nations are the last remaining ones on Earth, with all of the rest having succumbed to the Rash. Iceland alone remains unscathed while the other four are severely weakened by the disease. Larger cities are completely wiped out – for example, the capital of Sweden is moved from Stockholm to the small town of Mora – and humanity exists in small safe zones. Efforts to reclaim land from infected organisms are much less successful in this imagined world than in reality, due to the smaller armies of the surviving nations and a vastly increased number of infected organisms. Many sufferers refer to a crippling Danish defeat in the suburb of Kastrup, while attempting to retake the outskirts of Copenhagen, as an example.

Madsen’s Syndrome is also strange in that it is exclusively confined to people of Scandinavian descent and more specifically people from the nations of Iceland, Norway and Finland. While cases have been reported in Sweden and Denmark as well, investigation has shown those patients to be expatriates from the three afflicted countries. No cases from outside Nordic Council nations have ever been reported.

_Dagens Nyheter, online article, 3/4/2020_

* * *

 

The evening after Tuuri’s visit, Emil took the envelope and the little bottle of pills up to Lalli. He asked some questions, being as careful as he could to tread lightly around the issue. And Lalli, to his own surprise, actually answered.

Caught between his natural reticence and his lacklustre English, he did not explain well. Nor did he explain everything. But he said enough that night for Emil to begin to understand.

He had been thirteen when the Rash came to Finland and fourteen when the nightmares began. At first they were small, manageable. Snippets of catastrophe, almost abstract, mostly forgotten by the time he woke. A world swept clean by plague. A people clinging on by the tips of their fingers. A family torn apart and scattered amongst Finland’s carcass.

But over the years they had grown stronger, more persistent. He would remember events he had never been present for, could never have been present for. Scouting missions into the pine forests. A life in somewhere called Keuruu. The guilt of failure, the gnawing knowledge that his botched reports had cost people their lives. Hiding from monsters under starry skies, begging for just a few more seconds of moonlight, anything to keep him alive.

He had come to Sweden on an art scholarship, hoping a change of scenery would do him some good. But now, here in Stockholm, they had even begun intruding on his waking moments. He had quickly dropped out, unable to concentrate on his studies with his mind crowded by two competing realities that seemed to become more indistinguishable by the day. So he made ends meet by selling the paintings he made to ghoulish collectors looking for anything with a touch of the macabre.

Unused to talking at all, even less so about himself, Lalli had not found his confession easy. Emil clearly sensed this. At some point he moved from sat in Lalli’s chair to sat next to him on the bed, his arm around Lalli’s shoulders, holding him close. Lalli was so lost in trying to tell his story that he didn’t even notice when that happened.

 

* * *

 

Before, when the nightmares had struck and sent Lalli spinning dizzyingly between worlds, he had had nowhere to go. His only option had been to take one of the pills Onni sent him, pull the blankets over his head and try to ride it out as best as he could. Try and convince himself that the lunging monsters and strange landscapes weren’t really there.

But now he found he had another option.

Spring came early that year, and occasionally Emil would find himself being woken in the dead hours of those warm nights by a soft but insistent tapping on his door. He would get up and pad over to his door, blinking the sleep from his eyes. After the first few times he didn’t need to ask who it was, he just unlocked it and stood aside, letting Lalli slink in from the murky gloom outside.

Emil would put the kettle on in his little walk-in kitchen as Lalli stood around in the middle of his apartment room like a discarded bit of furniture, hugging his arms to his chest as he breathed the forceful, too-regular breaths of someone trying to keep it together. Emil, returning from the kitchen with two steaming mugs of cocoa and a small tin of cookies he kept for just these occasions, was often reminded of a small, trapped animal in the short, sharp movements Lalli made.

They would sit cross-legged on the floor, opposite each other with the tin between them, and Emil would do his level best to keep Lalli in the here and now. Sat there in the early morning darkness – no sense leaving the light on if you were trying to ease someone back to sleep – Emil would talk to Lalli, about everything and nothing, an endless babble of Swedish that ranged from his childhood memories to his views on politics to what he was going to have for dinner the next night. What he said, didn’t matter. Neither did the fact that Lalli didn’t understand a word of it. All that was important was the sound of the words, a constant trickle of noise that would worm its way behind the smokescreens Lalli’s nightmares and hallucinations threw up and provide a tenuous thread back to the real world.

Sometimes his voice wasn’t enough. Sometimes Emil would lay his hand on Lalli’s slender wrist, or even grip it firmly if he was really far gone. Ruffle his hair affectionately, comb it perhaps. Tactile sensations, stronger than words, anchoring Lalli as he was buffeted by whatever he saw in his head.

And when it was all over, when Lalli finally surfaced back into the world, Emil would reheat his cocoa in the microwave and Lalli would sip it wanly for a while before they went to bed. Well, before Emil went to bed. Lalli was content to sleep on the floor, no matter how many times Emil offered to give him the bed or at least shove over to make some room for him. But Lalli always turned him down.

More than once Emil would wake in the morning to find Lalli had rolled under his bed in the night, snoring softly and cocooned in a small nest he seemed to have made out of the blankets Emil gave him the night before. Seeing him like that tugged at something in the back of Emil’s mind. An odd déjà vu he could never place.

 

* * *

 

It was on one of these nights that Lalli, out of the blue, told Emil what he had not told him that day Tuuri had brought his medication round.

“Emil,” he whispered, sitting up with his back resting against the bed, the metal of the bedframe cold through his thin pyjamas and the sheets rustling against the nape of his neck.

“Mph?” Emil mumbled, coming blearily out from that halfway-house between wakefulness and sleep.

“Do you remember what I told you about my nightmares?”

“Yeah,” Emil said, instantly more awake.

“I did not tell you everything.”

There had been an expedition. A journey. Far away from the pine forests and wet marshes and wooden palisades of Keuruu. He didn’t know why. He didn’t know where to. Lalli-who-could-have-been didn’t bother himself with such trifles.

A ship down a river, clear as glass under the amber morning sun. A colossus on the horizon, a hulking titan of metal and wood, pointing its dragon prow westwards and setting sail, chasing the sunset like it was one of the monsters of the new world. A flurry of new places came and went. A city by a lake that bustled with activity, a city that rose on stilts from the sea and guarded the broken bridge to a silent world, a city ninety years dead but still teeming with twisted life.

New acquaintances came with the new territory. There was Tuuri, his one constant no matter where he seemed to go. But there were others too: a flame-haired woman who gave the orders and a large man who cleaned up after her. A boy about his age with a long red braid and who had a knack for intruding where he was not wanted.

And then there was Emil.

On the face of it, a chatty, pompous Swede with an over-inflated opinion of himself and an inability to keep his food in his mouth. But scratch the surface, get to know him a little – or be forced to spend interminable weeks cooped up in a tank with him – and Lalli began to suspect there was more to him than that. Began to wonder if they could be friends, or at least have the closest to a friendship Lalli was capable of forming.

Through thick and thin, through blizzards and raids and troll attacks, they grew closer as the winter rolled on. There was no English in this world that they could use as a common language, instead they had to use the shared tongue of gestures and expressions. Smiles in the morning, grimaces over terrible food, gentle pats on the back after a successful mission, tender hands on bandaged wounds.

It sounded good, happy almost. When the waking nightmares and the hallucinations showed him the time the two of them spent together in the frozen shell of an old-world city, they were almost not nightmares at all.

And then, eight months ago now, Lalli had walked out of his apartment door and found another Emil looking up at him in confusion.

“That is why I was so surprised to see you,” Lalli murmured, folding his arms on the bed next to Emil’s shoulders and resting his chin on his forearms. “Why I did not want to talk to you. I did not know… I was not sure…” He paused, frowning, trying to figure out how to say it in a language he wasn’t familiar with.

“I was not sure whether you were real or not,” he said at last, awkwardly aware of how nonsensical that might sound.

Emil listened to Lalli in a silence born out of confusion as much as anything else. What he was saying was impossible, wasn’t it? How could Lalli have seen him… well, seen him before he’d seen him, to put it one way?

“And am I?” he asked playfully, deciding to think about it more in the morning, when he wasn’t dog-tired.

“Hmm?”

“Am I real?”

“I am not sure,” Lalli said, sensing a joke might be on the way and deciding to go along with it.

Emil grinned and leaned over, putting their faces mere inches apart. “Then I guess I’ll have to prove it.”

“How?”

The question was barely out of Lalli’s mouth before Emil reached out and flicked Lalli hard on the end of his nose. Lalli squawked. He jerked backwards and rubbed his nose, glaring reproachfully at Emil.

“Yup,” Emil smiled cheerfully as he flopped back onto the bed. “Looks like I am.”

In spite of himself, Lalli smiled too.


	5. Chapter 5

Summer settled like a thick, humid blanket over Stockholm. Windows were flung open to let the slightest draft in, fans span aimlessly on desks, ice cubes were dropped into every drink in the city. Sweden’s capital sweltered under a heatwave in the first few weeks of June, the air hot and heavy, the stink of pollution lingering with no rain to wash it out.

Emil and Lalli would spend their evening sat in one or the other of their apartments, lounging around listlessly in t-shirts and shorts, rolling cold bottles from Emil’s fridge over their foreheads or sticking their arms out of Lalli’s open window to try and catch a cool breeze. They didn’t talk much. The oppressive heat made it too much of an effort.

Occasionally Emil would try and find a way of broaching what Lalli had told him that April’s night, sat up against the side of his bed. Had he really seen Emil in his nightmares, before they’d ever met in the flesh? He couldn’t imagine how. But every time he tried to bring it up, he couldn’t think of how to. There were too many questions he wanted to ask – was he sure it had been him? What was he like in this apocalyptic world? How did their story go under such different circumstances? – but none of them felt like the right one. Every time he opened his mouth to ask, his nerves would get the better of him and he’d close it again.

Lalli never brought the subject up either. Perhaps he regretted telling Emil. “I’ve seen you in my dreams” is a sentiment that could be interpreted in many ways, after all. Maybe it cut a little too close.

June meant the end of another year of Emil’s chemistry degree, another roll call of punishing exams and desperate revision. When the term was over, Emil made plans to attend a big family gathering in Malmö in the middle of the month. His uncle arranged a first-class ticket on a Dalahästen-II train for him to get down there, a little taste of luxury Emil had almost forgotten.

Lalli politely refused to come with him. Trains, he explained, were not his thing. Although at the time he did not quite know why.

 

* * *

 

The mercury had pushed 30 degrees that afternoon, and so in the early evening Lalli treated himself to cool shower. It had been a long day, after all. Not only had he had to deal with the heat, he’d had to deal with _people_ as well.

Tuuri had showed them round, as she always did. If Lalli had been left in charge of such matters they wouldn’t have gotten over the threshold. He’d have just pushed paintings out under the door until they saw one they liked, they’d have pushed money back to him, and everyone could go home happy without having to pretend they enjoyed each other’s company.

But he’d never sell anything that way, so Tuuri was called in to show prospective buyers his portfolios and works and to soothe any ruffled feathers along the way.

He sighed, letting out a long, slow breath, as the water washed away the day’s heat and sweat and bother.

It had been a couple this time, a man and a woman in their late twenties from the upmarket districts. The man in a pastel suit, the woman in an elegant dress and tiara. The 2020s would be harking back to the 1920s when it came to fashion, if what this pair of socialites were decked out in was any indication.

Lalli had disliked the pair of them from the moment he clapped eyes on them. They stank of new money and arrogance. It was in the way they walked, the way they talked. The way they looked at him as if they were doing him a favour by splashing a bit of cash on this down-on-his-luck artist eking out a living in Stockholm’s backwaters. They were probably looking for something a bit scandalous, Lalli thought, something they could hang on their walls to make their dinner guests gasp and splutter. Something to make them the talk of the town.

In the end they had settled on a small print of a troll, a strange rag of flesh scuttling along fresh snow with legs grown from ribs. Tuuri had commended them on their choice, helped them wrap it, took their money with a sweet smile as Lalli glared at them from the corner in stony silence.

Water on his face, neck, arms, chest, legs, feet, cold and soothing like autumn rain. Lalli leaned back against the shower door and let his mind wander.

It was a shame Emil would be gone for a week, he thought. He did not relish the idea of being alone with his nightmares after months of having someone to help him through them. He ought to go and say goodbye to Emil, now that he thought about it. Before he left to catch his train.

_His train.  
_

It happened without any warning at all.

 

* * *

 

The impact came out of nowhere, the train slamming into some unseen obstacle that shook it to and fro with an ear-splitting screech of tortured metal. Lalli was picked up by the force of it and slammed back down onto his bunk. His jaws snapped together and be briefly saw stars.

He was lucky. Emil – was it Emil, Lalli wondered dazedly as his vision blurred for a second and everything seemed to go black-and-white like a photograph, had Tuuri said his name was Emil or had he imagined that? – hadn’t the time to grab onto the belts and he was flung bodily from his bunk. The last Lalli saw of him was a look of immense surprise on his face as he disappeared over the side of the bed.

Another crash shook the train from side to side, throwing Lalli around in his bed as he clung on for dear life. A deafening shriek echoed around the cabin, followed by a deep mechanical snarl. Those buzzsaws he had seen on the outside of the train, Lalli guessed, doing their grisly work. He hoped they’d be enough.

From below him some people started talking gibberish and he looked over the edge of his bunk. Emil was being shouted at by someone in a uniform, while a woman in the same uniform was peering at the train walls and talking urgently into a phone. The saws droned again and yet another impact rocked the train.

Something ice-cold crawled up Lalli’s spine and he shivered in shock. He looked up, at the ceiling, and for a second it was as if he could see _through_ it, through the metal and pipes and gears. Something formless billowed above him, reaching down the length of the train, probing with clawed fingers, tapping, searching. Hunting.

No. Not hunting. It had no need to hunt what was already trapped.

A limb as shapeless as smoke found a chink in the steel ahead of him. As he watched in horror rotten muscles flexed and clenched and began ripping the metal away, gleefully picking the train’s armour apart like it was a child’s puzzle.

Below it, the train’s guards shouted to each other, utterly oblivious.

 

* * *

 

And like that he was back.

Lalli came to, found himself slumped against the shower door, cold water pooling around him. The water was a rich, ruddy pink, he noticed with groggy confusion. He put a hand to his nose and it came away dripping with blood.

_The train.  
_

Something would happen. Something had happened. Something had… not happened? He didn’t know. Couldn’t tell. But he knew one thing, one thing for certain.

Emil must not get that train.

He staggered to his feet, blood still pouring from his nose, and stumbled out of the shower. He didn’t bother to turn it off or dry himself. He barely remembered that he needed to dress himself before he left the apartment. He burst out of the door, clattered down the stairs with his t-shirt on backwards and his shorts on inside-out, dashing towards Emil’s door, desperately hoping with all his heart he wasn’t too late.

 

* * *

 

Emil had just finished packing his suitcase and was about to head up to say goodbye to Lalli when there was a knocking – no, a hammering – at his door.

He opened it in confusion and his eyes went wide in shock. There stood Lalli, dripping wet, his clothes stuck to his skin, with a bloody nose and a look of utter anguish on his face.

“Lalli! What in God’s name… are you ok? Are you hurt? What’s going on?” Emil babbled as Lalli almost toppled forwards and caught himself at the last minute.

“You are taking the train? You are going?” Lalli asked, as urgently as he could with his head spinning like it was, as Emil ushered him inside.

“Yeah…” Emil started uncertainly.

“ _Do not._ ”

“What?”

“Emil, please, do not go.”

“Lalli, what’s…?”

“Are you listening to me?”

“Y-yes, of course I am, but what-”

“ _Do not take that train!_ ” Lalli all but screamed, his eyes wild, gripping Emil by the shoulders. He shook his head to emphasise his point, spraying water and blood around Emil’s room. Emil jumped back, shocked at the change that had come over his friend. Even in the worst of his hallucinations he was never like this.

“Alright, alright,” he said, putting his hands up, smiling reassuringly. “I can see you’re in a bad way. Don’t worry! I can take a later one...”

He didn’t understand at all, Lalli realised. He thought Lalli was asking him to stay and look after him. But if the result was the same, it didn’t matter in the slightest.

“Good,” Lalli gasped, and promptly fainted.

 

* * *

 

_Ring, ring.  
_

“Hello? Tuuri Hotakainen speaking.”

“Tuuri, it’s Emil.”

“Emil…? Oh! Lalli’s friend, yeah, I remember. How’s it-”

“You know how you said to ring if he had a bad one?”

“Oh gods. What’s happened?”

“I don’t know! He came running down to my apartment, his nose was bleeding. I think he had a hallucination, but I’ve never seen him like this before.”

“Where is he now?”

“On my bed, he fainted.”

“Have you put him in the recovery position?”

“What? Crap! Ah… hold on… yes, yes I have now, he’s ok.”

“Good. Keep an eye on him, give him one of those pills I gave you when he wakes up. Just… just be there for him, okay?”

“Don’t need to say that twice.”

“Did he say anything? About what he saw?”

“Umm, no, not really. He was screaming at me not to take the train, but…”

“What train?”

“Oh, I was going to go down to Malmö tonight…”

“Emil? Don’t take that train.”

“What!? Of course not! I’m not going to leave him like this!”

“Good. I know. But Emil? _Don’t take that train._ ”

 

* * *

 

From Stockholm station, late that night, something emerged from under the steel and glass canopy that shielded the platforms from the wind and rain and shot off down the tracks.

It left behind it the snarl of engines and the thick stink of diesel fumes, the only evidence of its passing the disturbed air in its wake. The few seagulls still circling idly overhead barely saw it go, but they heard the roar of it and flew off with indignant squawks.

Onyx-black and navy-blue, it blended into the night almost perfectly as the rails curved round, away from the station and towards the outskirts of the city. It hit the curve faster than any train should have been able to, pneumatic mechanisms in its undercarriage hissing and twisting to keep it anchored to the rails as it hurtled down the line. The tracks stretched out ahead of it, an unbroken steel ribbon from Stockholm to Malmö, kilometre after kilometre of silent and forbidden land. Haunted, if you believed the rumours. Dangerous no matter what you believed.

And all in a day’s work for the new Dalahästen trains.

Buzzsaws whirred briefly and vents spat sprays of fire as it slipped through tunnels and underpasses, testing the defences one last time. It cleared the low wall that surrounded Stockholm in a second and sped away, blinking its headlamps in farewell as huge gates closed behind it. Small ports on its armoured flanks flipped open and parasite drones, paragliding on tiny chutes and tethered by carbon fibre threads, popped out and rose into the air above it. They scanned the surroundings through unblinking camera eyes, watching for anything creeping up on the tracks ahead.

Accelerating harder, hybrid motors howling as the drivers span them up, the Dalahästen charged headlong into the Silent Zone. By morning it would be in Malmö, safe behind walls and under the sun’s protective glare. But now, alone in the Swedish night, it was vulnerable and it knew it.

So it picked up the pace, and ran for its life.

 

* * *

 

When Emil woke the next morning, it took him a moment to remember where he was.

Warmth. Warm bedsheets, warm air, the summer morning’s heat already starting to permeate his apartment. And cold. Cold metal on the back of his torso and head. He blinked and looked around. He was sat slumped against the end of his bed, resting awkwardly against the metal frame. There was a crick in his neck that made him wince as he moved it. He groaned softly and staggered to his feet.

There on the bed was Lalli, his head resting lightly on Emil’s pillow and soaking it with the water from his hair that neither of them had bothered to dry. He murmured something in his sleep as Emil watched, and shifted slightly. Emil put a hand to his sleeping friend’s forehead to checking his temperature. He didn’t feel feverish or anything like that. Which was good, because Emil wouldn’t have had the first clue what to do if he was.

He dimly remembered waiting for Lalli to wake until an ungodly hour in the morning, whereupon he had slumped next to the bed and passed out before his head hit the side. He had briefly considered pushing Lalli to one side and trying to share the bed – an action his neck would certainly have thanked him for, he thought with a grimace as another bolt of pain shot down it – but decided against it. Lalli liked his space. If he woke before Emil, he wouldn’t like someone being so unexpectedly close.

It was looking to be a nice day, Emil thought as he stretched, yawned and glanced at the sunlight slanting in through the curtains. Maybe they could do something later. Go to a park or something like that, something to take Lalli’s mind off of things. Blearily, he checked his phone.

Ten missed calls, five unread messages.

He squinted in confusion at it, wondering if he’d picked up the right phone for a second. But it was definitely his, an expensive pre-Rash model crammed with technology you didn’t see a lot of these days. None of the calls had gone to voicemail – he had turned that feature off after one too many cold calling salespeople – so he checked the first of the messages.

It was from his uncle Torbjörn.

_Emil! You haven’t been answering your phone and we’re all worried sick about you. If you get this will you please call us to let us know you’re ok? Were you on that train?  
_

Another, from his father.

_Emil, if you can read this, call us NOW.  
_

Another, from aunt Siv.

_Emil please let us know you’re ok.  
_

He laughed and smacked his forehead with his palm. Idiot! He had completely forgotten to tell his family he wasn’t going to be turning up on time. No wonder they were worried, although ten calls and five texts seemed a bit excessive.

_Don’t worry, Uncle Torbjörn,_ he sent back. _I’m fine! Something came up, I had to stay in Stockholm. I’ll be down soon, I promise._

The reply came back in seconds. _Oh thank God you’re ok. You had us all so worried!  
_

Emil frowned. _I only missed the train, uncle, it’s not the end of the world.  
_

And then the reply: _Have you not seen the news!?  
_

The apartment’s Wi-Fi was down again so Emil turned on the TV, wondering what on earth his uncle was on about. He flicked to a news channel, and his mouth fell open in horror.

 

* * *

 

**Dalahästen-II Train Lost in Silent Zone  
**

The 22:00 Dalahästen train from Stockholm to Malmö has been reported missing with all hands.

The train, which departed Stockholm station on time, was expected at Malmö Central station at 6 o’clock this morning. When it failed to arrive on time, several attempts were made to contact it on emergency radio frequencies, but with no success.

The use of radio to contact the Dalahästen trains is reserved only for emergencies, due to evidence that radio frequencies attract infected organisms.

Search and rescue aircraft were scrambled at 06:30 and combed the line for the missing train. At 09:10, authorities issued a statement saying that the train had been located on a stretch of track outside the ruins of Nässjö. Aerial photographs allegedly indicate the presence of multiple infected organisms surrounding the train, which may have derailed. Sources from inside the Swedish Rail Authority have claimed that multiple breaches in the Dalahästen’s hull have also been imaged.

So far no pictures of the train have been released to the public.

A rescue train is currently underway from Stockholm. Members of the public with families and friends aboard the train are advised to contact the Swedish Rail Authority for further information.

_Dagens Nyheter, online article, 11/6/2020_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Turns out Lalli's visions can have their uses! We're almost at the end of this fic, just one more chapter to go...


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, it took a lot longer than I thought it would, but here we are at last. After endless rewrites and various crises, the final chapter. I really, really hope it lives up to expectations!

In his apartment, Emil sat slumped in his chair and watched the news with the expression of someone in a bad dream.

The man on the TV, wearing a sombre expression to fit the bad news he was delivering, was providing yet another blow-by-blow account of the train’s journey for anyone tuning in late. The casualty figures had just been revised upwards again, Emil noticed distantly.

_I was supposed to be on that train_ , he thought for the umpteenth time since he had turned his TV set on. _I was supposed to be one of those numbers._

But he wasn’t. Because Lalli… Lalli had… _what_ had Lalli done, exactly?

He looked over at Lalli, curled up under the bedsheets, still fast asleep.

_Lalli… saved me?_

Emil shook his head. No. That was ridiculous. Lalli had suffered a bad episode, and Emil had stayed behind to look after him. It was pure good luck that he had missed that train, nothing more. After all, Lalli had hallucinations and delusions, not _visions_.

Right?

On the bed, Lalli groaned softly and twitched, kicking and scrabbling his leg and arms like a dog having a bad dream. Almost instinctively Emil got up and walked over to him, checking his temperature again. His brow was warm but not hot, damp but not drenched with sweat.

Lalli seemed to relax slightly at the pressure of Emil’s hand on his forehead. His movements grew slower, more like those of someone asleep than someone terrified. Emil let his hand linger there for a second or two longer than necessary, wondering what nightmares were swirling behind the thin ridge of bone under his palm.

Then he pulled his hand away and went to fix the pair of them some breakfast for when Lalli eventually woke, feeling slightly guilt there wasn’t more he could do.

 

* * *

 

Lalli woke to the feeling of cold wood on his skin.

He blinked and opened his eyes, sitting up with a yawn and looking around him. Last he remembered, he had been dashing down the stairs to Emil’s apartment, trying desperately to warn him of some looming disaster that for the life of him he could no longer recall. But wherever he was now, it certainly wasn’t Emil’s place.

His first thought was that he had somehow come home. The place he was in reminded him so much of the marshes and forests of Finland, where he had played when he was just a boy and the Rash was nothing but a distant threat, that for a second he felt almost dizzy with homesickness. He was lying on a small platform of wooden boards in the middle of a cool, clear pond. All around him trees reached almost lazily up into a summer’s sky and the air was thick with the rich, earthen scent of warm rain. The faint lapping of the water and the rustle of wind in the trees was all he could hear.

Bewildered, he got to his feet and stretched experimentally, working the stiffness out of his joints. He wasn’t wearing his old clothes, he noticed. The moth-eaten t-shirt and shorts he had thrown on in a panic were gone, replaced by a rugged pair of trousers and a good cotton shirt. The kind of clothes his family had been able to afford before the Rash made them just another bunch of penniless refugees, scrabbling in charity bins and army surplus stores for whatever would fit.

The wood creaked under his bare feet as he took a few steps forward and jumped nimbly from the platform onto one of the planks that rimmed the water’s edge. Another few steps, cautious and light, put him on the soft earth beyond. The ground had the thick, spongy texture of marshland and rich, black soil oozed between his toes. A breeze played across his cheeks and arms, the air clean, fresh and carrying the distant smell of the forests and fens. The scent of home. It brought a smile to his face.

Lalli began to suspect that this was no dream or illusion. This felt like something more.

Through the trees ahead of him he spotted movement. Something flickered and shimmered for a moment, and then was gone.

Taking care to move slowly – Lalli had suffered enough from his hallucinations to know that nothing could be trusted – he started to pick his way between the trees towards it.

 

* * *

 

They’d actually got the king himself to make a speech, Emil noted as he stuck some bread in the toaster. He could hear him droning on from the TV he’d left on, over the sound of the kettle as it began to boil.

It was a tragedy, the man was saying as Emil slouched through from the kitchen while munching idly on a handful of cereal he had scooped straight out of the box. The loss of a Dalahästen was a tragedy but Sweden would learn from it, grow stronger from it. The standard new-world rhetoric about not being cowed by the monsters the Rash had built out of your friends and loved ones. Emil turned the TV off. It was difficult to stomach the words of a man who had spent the plague years cowering behind palace walls and gas-masked soldiers, even as county after county and even members of his own family were lost to the Rash.

The kettle boiled and Emil poured them both a mug of coffee, although he knew he’d probably have to re-heat Lalli’s in the microwave at this rate. Nonetheless, he set Lalli’s mug down on the bedside table next to him, wondering idly if the smell of coffee would wake him up. Lalli lived for his morning cup of coffee. Emil didn’t like to think what the poor guy would be like in a world without the stuff.

 

* * *

 

Lalli hopped over a tree root that was pushing through the surface of the ground like a wooden worm and stood in front of the thing he had glimpsed a moment ago. He stared at it in confusion, cocking his head to one side, trying to make head or tail of it.

It was like someone had taken a great axe and split this strange world in two. A scar stretching from left to right, extending as far as the eye could see in both directions. A chasm only a metre or so wide but so deep and tall that Lalli couldn’t even begin to guess how far it went. At the top of it a myriad of little lights twinkled and glimmered like the night sky, and below Lalli thought he saw the wet glimmer of water. A few wispy clouds seeped out of the scar, drifting aimlessly into the forest. It was one of these, he supposed, that had caught his attention earlier.

It wasn’t the scar that interested Lalli, though, so much as what was beyond it.

At first glance it seemed like just more Finnish wilderness, like the place he had woken up in. There were trees and ferns and a pond with the same planks floating in it as the ones he had found himself on. But there was something wrong about this other place. The land beyond the scar looked… _diseased._ There were trees, but they were stunted and broken. The water looked stagnant and oily. A few ferns, withered and brown, poked out of dry and lifeless soil. No wind stroked the few leaves that hung limply from the boughs. No soft sounds of water or birdsong filtered across the small gap that separated the healthy land from this blighted place.

The sight of it made Lalli’s skin crawl.

His first instinct was to turn tail and hurry back into the safety of the verdant forests on his side of the scar. But something, something he couldn’t explain, made him have second thoughts about that.

Maybe it was that none of his hallucinations, over five long years, had ever been anything like this. Even the worst of them had never seemed this real – and none of them had ever shown him anything like this before, either.

Something was going on, Lalli thought. And if there were answers to be found, he would be willing to bet they might be in that strange land beyond this bottomless gulf.

So he took a few paces back, steeled himself, and broke into a run. A few strides took him to the edge of the scar where the turf and grass faded away into the black and, before he had time to have second thoughts and pull back, he jumped.

 

* * *

 

The sun was climbing towards its midday station and Lalli still hadn’t woken up. Emil was beginning to worry.

He shouldn’t worry, he told himself as he paced back and forth in his cramped little kitchen, yet another mug of coffee in his hand. He really shouldn’t. Lalli was hardly a morning person at the best of times and he could probably do with all the rest he could get after what had happened to him last night.

Even so he couldn’t help but be a bit nervous, as he poked his head around the doorframe and checked on Lalli yet again. Still there in the bed, still fast asleep. Still tossing and turning slightly, the aftershocks working their way through him.

“Hang in there,” Emil muttered, and resumed his aimless pacing, berating himself once again for getting all worked up over what was probably nothing – or, at least, nothing he could help with.

 

* * *

 

It was like jumping into freezing water, like that time one winter’s holiday years ago when he’d fallen through a patch of ice on Lake Saimaa that was a lot thinner than it looked. Lalli hit the chasm between the two worlds at full pelt and gasped as the cold slammed into him. It wormed its way under his clothes, under his skin, down to his very bones. His lungs seemed to freeze solid and he fought for breath as he tumbled through the air.

He was between those two places – the living forest and the ruined wasteland – for maybe a second. Lalli had the briefest sensation of dark water and bright starlight, enormous and ancient things lurking in unseen shadows, reaching up for him with claws of bone, skulls of animals, empty eyes…

…and then he crashed through the thin barrier around the desolate place and hit the dry earth with an impact that rattled his teeth in his head. He stumbled, tripped and fell headlong into the dead leaves that littered the ground. The cold receded and air came back to his lungs. He lay face down on the ground for a second, rubbing his head where he had hit it and wondering what the hell to do next.

Before he could make a decision, he heard footsteps next to him. His head snapped up in surprise and he saw two pairs of booted feet come to a halt just in front of his face. Craning his neck, he looked up at whoever it was he was sharing this space with – and his mouth flopped open in shock.

On the left, a freckled face looked down at him with a look of surprise that mirrored his own. A long red braid and a light blue coat jogged all kinds of memories in Lalli. _It’s him_ , he realised. The foreign mage from his dreams, the one in the box, the one who went where he wasn’t wanted and dragged trouble in after him.

But the astonishment of seeing him paled in comparison to that of seeing who was stood next to him.

There, on the right, supporting himself on the red-haired mage’s shoulder like he hadn’t the strength to stand, clutching one hand to his chest like he was holding a wound closed, looking down at him from tired blue eyes set in a face fringed with scraggly and matted grey hair, was him. Was Lalli. Another Lalli. Dressed in furs instead of a shirt, booted instead of barefoot, but it was him all the same.

Lalli on the ground looked up at Lalli stood over him and tried to find the presence of mind to speak.

The foreigner with the braid spoke for him. “Lalli?” he asked, looking from one to the other with the look of someone who expects to be shown how the magic trick is done any second. “ _Lalli?_ What… what’s happening? Lalli, _why are there two of you?_ ”

One Lalli didn’t bother answering, the other couldn’t, had no answer to give.

Lalli’s doppelganger took his hand from the foreigner’s shoulder and took an unsteady, weak step towards him. Reaching down, still keeping his other hand clutched tightly to his chest, he put two fingers to Lalli’s forehead.

Where fingertip met brow, a small arc of blue leapt from one to another like electricity.

And finally, after five miserable, long years, Lalli understood.

 

* * *

 

_Memories come thick and fast. There is no time for explanation, but two versions of the same person can find other ways to talk in this world of dreams.  
_

_-Yet another raid one winter’s morning as the sun struggles to clamber over the horizon, an old building of stone walls and wooden floors.-  
_

_-Lalli and Emil carting books out in bags, Emil chattering away in his incomprehensible language like he does, Lalli just happy to listen to the sound of it.-  
_

_-One last journey inside, to collect the last few books left. Better keep it quick, Lalli thinks. If they spend too much time at this place, something might realise they’re there.-  
_

_-Walking down the corridor side by side, the door to the outside a rectangle of light at the far end, when all of a sudden something rounds a corner in front of them. The outside light is cut off by fleshy bulk. Writhing eyes watch them with something like mockery in the flickering light of Emil’s torch. Talons flex. Muscles clench. Teeth are bared and an ear-splitting screech fills the air.-  
_

_-Lalli is moving, diving to one side but he’s not fast enough and a slobbering maw fills his vision and he doesn’t even have the time to close his eyes before the end-  
_

_-Hands not deformed grab him and shove him away, arms that are still human hurl him to safety. Claws meant for him crunch through Emil’s body instead, the wrong person’s blood spatters up the wall.-  
_

_-Lalli is on his hands and knees, crawling away desperately, Emil is groaning in the corner, the troll is looming over the pair of them-  
_

_-Sigrun’s red hair burns like a second sun in the light of Emil’s dropped torch as her head rises into view behind the troll’s shoulder. Its head snaps round just in time to see her finger tightening on her rifle’s trigger. The gun roars, the troll gurgles and collapses to the ground. Half its head is missing.-  
_

_-Out into the cold air and bright winter light, running as fast as they can with Emil slung between them, leaving a river of his blood on the floor behind them. Emil is coughing, spluttering, trying to speak, and Sigrun roars something at him that Lalli guesses must be an order to keep quiet, save his strength.-  
_

_-Tuuri and Reynir are bundled into the office to keep them quarantined. Emil is laid out on one of the beds and Lalli clutches one of his hands in his own as Mikkel readies his scissors and syringes and other tools Lalli has no names for.-  
_

_-Emil tries to speak as Mikkel’s anaesthetic takes hold, looks right into Lalli’s eyes and tries to say something, but the drugs are faster and his eyes close and the hand Lalli is holding goes limp.-  
_

_-Mikkel seems to take hours to do his work, bandaging and stitching. All Lalli can think about, as he sits in the corner and stares at nothing at all, is that it should be him on that bed.-  
_

_-Emil is lucky, Tuuri tells him that night over food Lalli has no appetite for. According to her, Mikkel says his wounds are not as severe as they look. He may yet survive.-  
_

_-The expedition is stalled while they wait for Emil to recover. While they wait to see_ if _he recovers. If he wakes up, Mikkel says, he should be alright. If.-  
_

_-Outside, the winter worsens.-  
_

_-One night as he sleeps, Lalli finds something horrible outside the walls of his haven.-  
_

_-There, all but waiting for him as he steps out into the wider dreamworld, is a tiny spark. It is so small he almost misses it.-  
_

_-It is Emil. He knows this even before he picks it up, before he touches it and gets a rush of sight and sound and scent and memory. Blond hair, brash laughter, a wide friendly grin all dance behind his eyes for a second as his fingertips brush this tiny, fizzing little ball. It is Emil’s soul, here in the dreamworld. Readying itself for its journey to Tuonela.-  
_

_-Lalli takes it back with him into his haven. He sits on the floating platform, clutches it to his chest, and before he can stop himself he has burst into tears.-  
_

_-Onni would know what to do, how to save him, but he’s nowhere to be found. In the meantime Lalli tries to keep Emil alive, doing what he can in the world beyond even as Mikkel changes bandages and cleans wounds in the waking one.-  
_

_-Every night Lalli pours a little bit of energy into the spark, trying to keep it from going out. Around him his haven starts to wither and grow dim. He doesn’t care.-  
_

_-One night Reynir visits him in his haven. It has been a while since he came here, and he is horrified to see what has become of the place. Rotten trees, stagnant ponds, broken planks and dead ferns. Lalli sat there in the middle of the decay, haggard and tired, giving up years of his life for just a few more moments of Emil’s.-  
_

_-He has news of why Onni can’t reach them. Denmark’s dead are massing outside. Ghosts of the old world, waiting with cold patience for the ailing soul they can smell. Hungry, persistent. Onni can’t get past them. He is strong, but they are stronger.-  
_

_-Lalli has an idea. A desperate one, but it’s all they have.-  
_

_-He puts everything he has into it. Every last shred of energy, every last drop of life left in his haven. A shout, a shout so loud Onni will be able to hear it even on the far side of the dead that are encircling them. A call of desperation that he can follow to this place.-  
_

_-Lalli screams until his vocal cords feel like they are on fire. There is no response.-  
_

_-And then, from behind them, a crash, a thud, the sound of something – or_ someone _– hitting the ground.-  
_

_-But it’s not Onni. And as he looks down at his own face staring up at him in confusion from the wreckage of his haven, Lalli realises that his plan may indeed have worked – but not in the way he had hoped.-_

* * *

 

Lalli looked up wide-eyed as the other Lalli pulled his hand away.

He understood now.

His visions had never been visons. His hallucinations had always been real. Five years of delusions and nightmares had been because of this, the bow wave of the call that had brought him into this world. A call that had touched every mage in Scandinavia, if what he knew of his world was right. He chuckled as he remembered his therapist in Helsinki sitting him down and explaining ‘Madsen’s Syndrome’ to him. He wondered if their gruff healer would be proud of his alternate self.

Five years of night terrors and debilitating fear because the Lalli stood in front of him, tired and worn from the energy he had expended to keep his Emil alive, had botched his spell at the last minute. Lalli wondered if he should be angry. But he felt only relief.

Because now he had a chance to fix things.

“Let me see,” he said softly, getting to his feet and pointing at the hand the other Lalli still held clutched to his chest.

The other Lalli nodded and uncurled his fingers. There, sat on his upturned palm, was a small ball of light that sparked and crackled like the end of a sparkler. Emil’s soul, formless in this place with no magical talent to shape it, but his nonetheless.

For a moment Lalli was tempted to reach out, to try and reach _in_ to that soul, to find out what Emil really thought of him, how he felt about him, but did not.

Instead he simply rolled his shoulders and cracked his knuckles. _You need energy, you need life to save him,_ he thought. The other Lalli nodded in wordless understanding.

Lalli looked behind him, past the fissure he had traversed to get here, into the rich woodlands he had woken in. His own haven, that he had never seen before and, he suspected, never would again.

_I have all you need.  
_

The other Lalli smiled softly. _Thank you.  
_

_Take care of him.  
_

_I will.  
_

What happened next, Lalli would never fully recall. There was a sensation like someone had stuck a hook into his heart and was dragging it out through his ribcage, and feeling of his very essence being torn from him. He screamed but he couldn’t hear anything over a sudden roaring in his ears. He had the briefest sensation of trees withering and soil cracking, of a woodland glade being consumed to feed a raging inferno.

One Lalli’s power was not enough to save Emil. But two? That’s a different story.

A figure of fire stood before him for an instant, erupting from the other Lalli’s hand as he shouted his enchantments and prayers. It smiled at him, a smile he would recognise anywhere, and then his vision clouded and darkened and he was gone.

 

* * *

 

Lalli woke to the smell of coffee in the air.

He groaned blearily and looked around. He was in a bed, tucked under soft sheets. In a room with the afternoon sun splashing the window’s shadow on the opposite wall, in an apartment that wasn’t his, in a world that was.

He was home.

“Lalli? Lalli!”

A face loomed above him, a familiar grin shone in the afternoon’s light, and for a second Lalli remembered the figure of fire whose birth had sent him tumbling back into the real world. He blinked and squinted up at it until it popped into focus.

“You’re awake!” Emil cheered. “You had me worried,” he added, softly.

“I will be fine,” Lalli grumbled with a little smile as he sat up. His hair was damp, he realised. It mustn’t have been dried since that shower he took, only a few hours ago. It felt like a lifetime.

Emil sat down next to him and spread his hands in front of Lalli’s face.

“You were out for a while. How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Eleven,” Lalli scowled. “Now please tell me you have got a cup of coffee somewhere.”

“You sound normal enough,” Emil beamed, and with that he sprang to his feet and trotted over to his tiny kitchen. Lalli heard the _click_ of the kettle being switched on and the dull rumble as it started to boil.

Emil re-emerged a moment later with a steaming mug full of the thickest, blackest coffee he’d ever brewed, which Lalli sipped appreciatively when he handed it to him. He sat down next to Lalli on the bed and seemed lost in thought for a while, as if trying to broach a delicate topic.

“Lalli,” he said at last, “you know that train I was supposed to get?”

Lalli had to think for a moment to remember what he was on about. So much had happened so suddenly his mind was still reeling. He still wasn’t sure how much of what he remembered was actually real. Eventually he dredged up the memory, and nodded.

“It’s a good job I didn’t.”

“Why?” Lalli asked, already knowing the answer.

“It… crashed. On the way to Malmö,” Emil said quietly. “And if I had been on it… if you hadn’t stopped me from going…”

He trailed off, unsure of what to say next. Eventually he must have decided that actions do indeed speak louder than words. Before Lalli really knew what was going on he found himself being swept up in an awkward hug, Emil’s arms around his shoulders and his hair soft on Lalli’s cheek. Lalli squawked in surprise and tried to keep his coffee from getting spilled.

“Thank you,” Emil whispered. “I think you just saved my life.”

_Yours and another’s_ , Lalli thought with a small smile, and for the first time in so many years, he not only let someone hug him, but actually hugged them back.

 

* * *

 

_It’s a bitter winter’s dawn in dead Copenhagen. Snow is dancing on the howling winds and the clouds hang heavy and gunmetal grey over the ruins.  
_

_But for Lalli Hotakainen it might just be the finest morning he can remember.  
_

_“Hej, Lalli,” Emil gasps, his voice thick and woozy thanks to the painkillers. “Hur mår du?”  
_

_For a moment Lalli thinks he’s misheard, or that it’s just wishful thinking. But no. There is Emil, on the bunk above him, leaning over the side with a grimace to look down at Lalli who was sleeping in the hollow beneath.  
_

_He’s awake. He’s going to make it. Lalli’s stupid, desperate plan worked.  
_

_The relief, the joy he feels is impossible to put into words. And even if he could, Emil wouldn’t understand one bit of it. So instead Lalli just crawls out from under the bed, kneels next to it and gently rests his head on Emil’s chest, feeling the gentle thump of his heart, the rise-and-fall of his lungs, the signs of a life they’ve both fought tooth and nail for.  
_

_After a while Emil starts to tidy Lalli’s hair, murmuring something in Swedish, no doubt berating him for looking like a homeless person.  
_

_They stay like that for a long time, as the sun slowly peers over the horizon and another day gradually begins to dawn._

 

* * *

 

Emil finally made it to Malmö a few days later, although this time he splashed out and booked a plane ticket. There is such a thing as tempting fate, after all.

He was gone for two weeks, during which time Lalli didn’t have a single nightmare or hallucination. Every night he went to bed nervous, waiting for something nasty to slither up out of the depths of his mind, but it never did. After a while he began to suspect that nothing would now. If what he had seen in that strange dreamworld was anything to go by, their purpose had been served.

When Emil came back he found a present waiting for him. A new painting, one Lalli had never even hinted he was working on. A landscape drawing with the broken spires of an abandoned city crowding the background. In the foreground was a boxy grey vehicle with a small group of people clustered around it, barely stick figures at the distance the scene was drawn from. One of them, with blond hair and a white uniform, was facing away from the tank, raising his hand. On the other side of the painting, far away from the others, was another figure. This one was thinner and had grey hair, and was raising his hand as well.

Was it farewell? Or welcome back? Emil couldn’t tell, no matter how long he sat and stared at it.

Next to the painting he had found a scrawled note: _  
_

_I do not know how their story ends, but I hope ours will be worth telling._

_-Lalli_

* * *

 

**New Exhibition Opens in Stockholm  
**

The Wetterling Gallery in Stockholm opened a new series of exhibits today as part of its popular ‘Monsters of the New World’ display, which is devoted to art depicting organisms infected by the Rash.

Prominent amongst the new exhibits are a series of portraits by Lalli Hotakainen, a Finnish artist living in Stockholm whose work has gained a reputation over the past year for its realistic depictions of infected organisms.

Mr Hotakainen, who grew up suffering from Madsen’s Syndrome, claims his work is directly influenced by his experiences with the condition. Despite being a relative newcomer to Stockholm’s art scene, he has already received a great deal of praise for the lifelike quality of his paintings and many local art critics are of the opinion that his work has the potential to achieve national renown.

Mr Hotakainen declined to attend the opening of the exhibition and could not be reached for comment. His close friend Emil Västerström, nephew of Torbjörn Västerström, the CEO of Västerström Industries, attended the opening in his place.

“Lalli doesn’t really like publicity,” Mr Västerström told reporters. “But I’m sure he’d be delighted to see how many people are here to see his work today.”

All proceeds from the ‘Monsters of the New World’ exhibit are being donated to charities devoted to aiding refugees displaced by the Rash.

_Dagens Nyheter, online article, 1/7/2021_


End file.
